Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India.djvu/60

This page needs to be proofread.
—— Linguistic area. Nasal Index. Stature.
Kuruba Canarese 74.9 162.7
Bōya Telugu 74.4 163.9
Tōta Balija TeluguDo. 74.4 163.9
Agasa Canarese 74.3 162.4
Agamudaiyan Tamil 74.2 165.8
Golla Telugu 74.1 163.8
Vellāla Tamil 73.1 162.4
Vakkaliga Canarese 73 167.2
Dāsa Banajiga CanareseDo. 72.8 165.3
Kāpu Telugu 72.8 164.5
Nāyar Malayalam 71.1 165.2

This table demonstrates very clearly an unbroken series ranging from the jungle men, short of stature and platyrhine, to the leptorhine Nayars and other classes.

In plate V are figured a series of triangles representing (natural size) the maxima, minima, and average nasal indices of Brahmans of Madras city (belonging to the poorer classes), Tamil Paraiyans, and Paniyans. There is obviously far less connection between the Brahman minimum and the Paraiyan maximum than between the Brahman and Paraiyan maxima and the Paniyan average; and the frequent occurrence of high nasal indices, resulting from short, broad noses, in many classes has to be accounted for. Sir Alfred Lyall somewhere refers to the gradual Brahmanising of the aboriginal non-Arayan, or casteless tribes. "They pass," he writes, "into Brahmanists by a natural upward transition, which leads them to adopt the religion of the castes immediately above them in the social scale of the composite population, among which they settle down; and we may reasonably guess that this process has been working for centuries." In the Madras Census Report, 1891, Mr. H. A. Stuart states that "it has often been asserted, and is now the